Challenging the (Liberal Democratic) Hegemony? Rights and Freedoms in Far-Right Electoral Discourses

Over the recent decades, far-right actors across Europe and beyond have not only successfully adopted the hegemonic (liberal democratic) vocabulary but also creatively adapted it to their own ideological needs, turning such concepts as democracy or freedom into key discursive tools in their strategies of power struggle. By taking the cases of three very dissimilar (populist) far-right parties from across Europe, the French National Rally (Rassemblement National), Spanish Vox, and Polish Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), this paper explores mechanisms behind the discursive construction and use of the concept of rights and freedoms in the electoral contexts across the EU. In practice, it focuses on verbal and visual texts uploaded on the official YouTube channels of these parties in the run-up to their latest respective national parliamentary elections. The analysis of verbal communication combines elements of Rhetorical-Performative Analysis with some methods and techniques of the Discourse-Historical Approach to CDA which deals with functional grammar, reference analysis, and pragmatics. The analysis of visual texts relies on the methodological toolkit of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. The paper shows that in the electoral contexts, the (populist) far-right deploys references to rights and freedom in the process of social identity construction to mobilise the electorate. At the same time, as the (populist) far right decontests the concept of rights and freedoms along populist, nativist, and authoritarian lines, it normalises and mainstreams its (marginal and radical) views and positions, ultimately challenging the existing hegemonic order.